Listen to narration by a local historian

An empty intersection is a rare sight where little Henrietta Street joins South Clinton and South Goodman today.

Clinton and Goodman form the western boundary of Swillburg, a neighborhood demarcated by Interstate 490 to the north and Field Street to the southeast.

The neighborhood’s nickname refers to a time when German immigrants such as George Goebels and his Irish-immigrant neighbors fed “swill” to their many swine. Swillburg was cast as a term of derision in the early 20th century, then spurned (for obvious reasons), and eventually reclaimed with pride in the 1970s.

Most Rochesterians probably haven’t given the name or the intersection in this photo much thought — it is for many, after all, a mere place to pass through between home and work.

The same was true in the 1950s when this black-and-white photo was taken. The major roads that provide Swillburg with its borders were busy carrying suburbanites from the city’s center to homes in Henrietta, Brighton and beyond.

Yet the same roads that led out of the city also brought folks deeper into it. And many people stayed in Swillburg, building lives and businesses.

Irish immigrant and variety store owner Thomas Riley was among Swillburg’s denizens. For many years, he commuted to Swillburg from the Maplewood neighborhood to manage the shop pictured here.

In 1937, amid the strains of the Great Depression, Thomas and his wife Myrtle moved their three children two blocks away from this vantage point, into one of a neat row of single-family homes on Lansdale Street.

One imagines some Saturday in the 1950s, the Rileys might have crossed the intersection from their shop and taken in a matinee starring Marlon Brando or Gary Cooper at the newly renovated, newly named, art deco-themed Cinema Theatre, which still sits today just south of the camera’s gaze.

(For anyone who has enjoyed being surprised by the Cinema’s cats — the dearly missed Princess Baby and now, the slower-to-warm One-Eyed Sue — there’s neither hide nor hair to be found in the historical record regarding the existence of feline forebearers.)

Across the street from Riley’s and the Cinema, Bertha Baccari, owner of Vernon’s Cleaners & Dyers, a shop seen on the left side of the frame, might not have had time for a movie. She and her husband, Walter, an Italian immigrant, would have been busy shuffling between their two other dry cleaning and dyeing locations, both in other parts of the city.

Today, cigarette ads, like the one above Vernon’s, are illegal. Now folks wet their whistle at the Angry Goat Pub, where Riley’s customers once purchased hand-rolled cigars and homemade confections. Bertha’s shop is now a Gulf gas station, and modest family homes like the Rileys’ are often successfully flipped for tidy profits.

As Swillburg, like Rochester, moves on, $10 gets you a double feature, a large popcorn with real butter, and a seat beside One-Eyed Sue at the Cinema. They aren’t 1950s prices, but a visit to the movies is about as close to this quaint scene as you’re likely to find.

Michael Read is a transplant from the West who studies history and likes the soil and cold of upstate. He’s happy to have taken root here.